24 Facts About Vladimir Shlapentokh

Vladimir Emmanuilovich Shlapentokh was a Soviet and American sociologist, historian, political scientist, and university professor, notable for his work on Soviet and Russian society and politics as well as theoretical work in sociology.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was a Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was widely considered a "founding father" of Soviet sociology.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was born and educated in Kyiv in the former Soviet Union.

Vladimir Shlapentokh wrote columns appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

From 1982, Vladimir Shlapentokh served as a consultant to the United States government, regularly reporting on social processes, ideology, and public opinion on post-communist states, including Russia.

Vladimir Shlapentokh spoke English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other Slavic languages.

Vladimir Shlapentokh began his career in social science as a Soviet sociologist and was one of the founders of a new science which had been forbidden in the USSR until the 1960s.

Vladimir Shlapentokh contends that it is impossible to explain society with the contribution of just one theoretical model which supposes that the whole society functions according to the principles of a single system.

Vladimir Shlapentokh comes up against the erroneous use of the historical approach in social analysis which supposes the permanent appearance of new social structures and the disappearance of the old ones.

Vladimir Shlapentokh applies his segmented approach to the analysis of three societies: Soviet society, post-Soviet Russia and the United States.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was one of the first to study the processes of privatization during the post-Stalin era.

Vladimir Shlapentokh denies the inevitability of the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, and believes that if Gorbachev had not launched his ill- conceived reforms, the USSR, which was not endangered unlike tsarist Russia by foreign countries, could have continued to function for many years.

Contrary to many contemporary American social scientists who do not use the term "ideology," but have rather replaced it due to the influence of postmodernists with the vague term "narration," Vladimir Shlapentokh is inclined to see ideology, which is a set of values and beliefs, as a very powerful social factor which influences almost all types of social activity, particularly the opinions of people.

Vladimir Shlapentokh discusses another mechanism of adaptation to the dominant ideology which he labels as "'values for me and values for others," which was initially published in the article "The Study of Values as a Social Phenomenon: the Soviet Case".

Vladimir Shlapentokh rejects relativism in the social sciences, and operates under the concept of "hard reality," which is defined as a reality that can only be delineated by existing objective empirical data.

Vladimir Shlapentokh pays special attention to the actual repression in the Soviet system as well as to the fear of potential repression.

Vladimir Shlapentokh suggests that fear of the authorities, party bosses, and political police, was a major underlying reason for the endurance of the Soviet system.

In Vladimir Shlapentokh's opinion, being as an outsider, Orwell better understood the essence of Soviet society than many critical analysts inside the country.

Vladimir Shlapentokh insisted that the numerous authors who discussed Orwell ignored or underestimated the contribution that Orwell's 1984 had to the social sciences, such as the discovery of an efficient mechanism that allows people to adapt to any hierarchical organization, from a department at an American University to the Soviet totalitarian society.

Vladimir Shlapentokh asserts that only "the love of Big Brother" guarantees the individual perfect conformity, which is discussed in Shlapentokh's essay "George Orwell: Russia's Tocqueville," published in a book of compiled scholarly essays on Orwell, George Orwell into the Twentieth Century.

For Vladimir Shlapentokh, it is the elites, not the masses, which are the creators and the modifiers of ideology.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was the director of the first national surveys based on random samplings in the 1960s and 1970s, which were the first national scientific surveys in the history of the Soviet Union.

The major mark of totalitarian society, the role of fear and ideology, makes clear why Vladimir Shlapentokh made the focus in his methodological studies the empirical validity of sociological data.